Comments on: MSN biased to favor IIS servers?

By: drakke

drakke — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

MSN "biased" to favor IIS servers?

Take five minutes and fix this problem please.

By: peach

peach — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

The research results aren’t shocking. I wouldn’t take it serious

By: ssttoo

ssttoo — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

I took that Alexa server stats challenge :) Here are the results – http://www.phpied.com/alexa-500-server-stats/

In brief: Apache – 54%, IIS – 23%.

By: DanThies

DanThies — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Brilliant, ssttoo, thanks! I had no idea anyone could slap code together that fast and actually run the test, but I guess that's why you're a SitePoint Zealot. :D

This actually shows about the same ratio (2:1 for Apache) as Ivor found in MSN's search results. Makes sense, since MSN is using a much smaller index than Google and you'd expect their SERPs to be more biased vs. larger sites. When it comes to crawling the web, nobody's keeping up with G just yet.

Now for one million "programming mojo points," someone take the Alexa Top 500, extract the META keywords tags from all of them, and see whether they have more top rankings on Google or MSN.

Netcraft's latest numbers show 69% of domains on Apache, 20% on IIS, lending credence to the notion that these raw numbers don't really reflect what the most popular sites are running. More popular sites are likely to have more and stronger incoming links, which of course makes them more likely to appear on any given SERP.

By: ssttoo

ssttoo — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Thanks, Dan! I’m not quite clear on the what you want to do with the meta keywords, but I’ll post the code and the data from my test, so if anyone’s interested, they can take it from there.

By: Young Twig

Young Twig — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

I rank best in MSN and I'm on a LAMP server.

By: ssttoo

ssttoo — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s the Alexa stats collector
http://www.phpied.com/alexa-500-server-stats-the-code/

By: DanThies

DanThies — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

What I was looking for, and it would be a BIG project, would be to compare SERPs from Google and MSN as Ivor did, to see which engine has more of a “bias” in favor of popular sites. My money’s on MSN.

By: saif

saif — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Well the question is , is this bias deliberate or accidental? doing for a search for browser wars yields different results for google and MSN. Interesting the yields for MSN pick more sites that favor IE6 than Firefox

By: DanThies

DanThies — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Now that MS is offering tabbed browsing in IE (actually it’s been available for some time, just not well known) I wonder if Firefox has already had its day in the sun. Packaging it with the MSN search toolbar seems like a shot at Google too – if Windows users are willing to tolerate a browser that often crashes into oblivion with each minor update (Firefox) in order to get tabbed browsing, will they also be willing to dump the Google toolbar for MSN’s to get the same?